High Availability (HA) Install

For production environments, we recommend installing Rancher in a high-availability configuration so that your user base can always access Rancher Server. When installed in a Kubernetes cluster, Rancher will integrate with the cluster’s etcd database and take advantage of Kubernetes scheduling for high-availability.

This procedure walks you through setting up a 3-node cluster with RKE and installing the Rancher chart with the Helm package manager.

Important: For the best performance, we recommend this Kubernetes cluster to be dedicated only to run Rancher. After the Kubernetes cluster to run Rancher is setup, you can create or import clusters for running your workloads.

Recommended Architecture

DNS for Rancher should resolve to a Layer 4 load balancer (TCP)

The Load Balancer should forward port TCP/80 and TCP/443 to all 3 nodes in the Kubernetes cluster.

The Ingress controller will redirect HTTP to HTTPS and terminate SSL/TLS on port TCP/443.

The Ingress controller will forward traffic to port TCP/80 on the pod in the Rancher deployment.